Not just that, but Corman also worked hard to distribute foreign films in the United States, including works from the likes of Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, François Truffaut, & even Akira Kurosawa... and this leads us to the one & only time Roger Corman ever dubbed an anime!
The year 1977 would be possibly the most important one in the career of the late, great Leiji Matsumoto. Space Battleship Yamato, which Matsumoto helped co-create, initially saw a cold reception when it first aired in 1974, but via reruns would find itself a growing fanbase that culminated in the first Yamato movie in 1977 being seen in theaters by 2.3 million people & grossing 2.1 billion yen, over 10x its budget. Meanwhile, on the manga front, Matsumoto would debut two series that year which would go on to become Matsumoto's magnum opuses. Over in the pages of Akita Shoten's Play Comic magazine was Space Pirate Captain Harlock, which completely reimagined characters from 1972 western manga Gun Frontier for a space-faring sci-fi adventure, becoming the de facto form that people would recognize the likes of the titular Harlock & his best friend, Tochiro Oyama. Meanwhile, over in the pages of Shonen Gahosha's Weekly Shonen King was Galaxy Express 999, which took the idea of a space faring train as seen in the Kenji Miyazawa novel Night on the Galactic Railroad & told an epic space opera espousing the value of human life when faced with the possibility of gaining immortality by way of moving over to mechanical bodies. Alongside future works like 1978's Queen Emeraldas & 1980's Queen Millennia these manga would form the basis of what fans have since called the "Leijiverse", a loose continuity between Matsumoto's various space-themed sci-fi stories that have some general feeling of an overall shared timeline but otherwise shouldn't be taken as anything explicitly organized, or even canon. By the way, the "999" is officially pronounced "Three-Nine", similar to how Submarine Super 99 is pronounced "Nine-Nine" & Interstella 5555 is pronounced "Four-Five"; it's just a quirk of Matsumoto's titles, I guess.
Galaxy Express 999 would become an instant hit, resulting in Toei Animation debuting a TV anime adaptation that ran for 113 episodes from 1978 to 1981, ending the same year as the manga did, as well as a handful of TV specials that mainly just recapped specific episodes & stories seen in the TV anime. While the TV anime was airing, though, Toei also would produce a film adaptation of Galaxy Express 999 that told its own version of the story, bringing in Shigeyuki Hayashi, who had first worked with Toei all the way back in 1958 as an in-between animator for the film Hakujaden & had since started using the pseudonym Rintaro, to direct; Rintaro had just finished directing the Captain Harlock TV anime for Toei. The 999 film would be Rintaro's theatrical debut as director, be the highest-grossing domestic film in Japan for 1979, would later win a Japanese Academy Award in 1980, and Toei would follow through with a Rintaro-directed sequel, Adieu Galaxy Express 999, in 1981. The smash success of the first film, though, would catch the eye of Roger Corman, who at the time was running New World Pictures, which he co-founded in 1970. New World would license the film, cut it down from its original 129-minute length to roughly 91 minutes, & dub it into English, resulting in the simpler titled Galaxy Express premiering in America on August 8, 1981. This would be Corman's only time working with anime, though a post-Corman New World would later distribute Manson International's Warriors of the Wind in 1985, a notoriously edited down version of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind; I reviewed that film way back in 2013.
Embassy Home Entertainment would then release Galaxy Express on VHS & Betmax in 1984, giving Corman's dub of the film its sole home video release. While the original Japanese film would later see re-release (& an uncut dub, alongside the second film) by Viz on VHS in 1996, followed by both dual-audio DVD & BD releases by Discotek Media in 2011 & 2017 respectively, the original dub is stuck in licensing hell, as ownership of the New World library was sold & resold in the decades since Galaxy Express. Today, that original edited dub may currently be owned by The Walt Disney Corporation, following the purchase of 21st Century Fox in 2019; it wouldn't become standard for dubs to revert back to the Japanese licensor until at least the 00s. However, while there currently does not exist a proper HD recut of Galaxy Express (yet...), the film has been ripped & shared online for years, so let's honor the life & legacy of Roger Corman by checking out how he once handled an iconic anime property like Galaxy Express 999.
Joey Hanakanabobakananda Smith [Tetsuro Hoshino] is an orphaned street urchin in the giant city of Megalopolis, where mechanized people live in opulence while "normal" humans live on the streets, working alongside his friends to accomplish one goal: Stealing a ticket to ride on the space faring train, "The Galaxy 999". After seeing his mother gunned down by Count Mecha as human-hunting sport as a child, Joey wants nothing more than to ride the Galaxy 999 to its final destination, Andromeda, a planet where any human can be given a mechanical body for free, effectively giving them immortality; to Joey it's the only way he can avenge his mother's murder. On his most recent attempt Joey manages to swipe a Galaxy 999 ticket but has to escape the Mechanized Police for his crime, only barely managing to escape with the help of Maetel, a young woman who reminds Joey of his mother; unfortunately, Joey loses the ticket upon his escape. However, Maetel is able to give something better: A infinite use pass to ride the Galaxy 999. All Joey has to do is agree to go all the way to Andromeda, get a mechanical body, & allow Maetel to accompany him for the entire trip. Joey has a feeling there's more to Maetel than what she's letting on, but he's willing to overlook all of that if it means he can get his revenge on Count Mecha, and all the better if he manages to get the help of both Captain Warlock [Captain Harlock] & Emeralda [Emeraldas], two of the most wanted pirates in the galaxy.
At a time where most theatrical anime productions accompanying a TV series were mostly (if not entirely) compilation movies of said TV content, the Galaxy Express 999 movie was purposefully made to NOT be one of those. Instead, it's a wholly unique adaptation of Leiji Matsumoto's story, telling an accelerated tale where Tetsuro & Maetel travel to four locations: Titan, Pluto (both of which have been terraformed to support life), the town of Trader's Fork on the planet Heavy Melder, & finally the mechanization planet in the Andromeda system (the name of which is a major spoiler); admittedly, that's a rather meager amount of stops for a legendary train like the 999. Each of these stops play a major part in the overall story, though, whether it's Titan establishing some characters & plot points that appear later, Pluto showing what happens to the human bodies of those who accept mechanization, Heavy Melder leading into Tetsuro's final confrontation with Count Mecha in his elusive Time Castle, & finally the mechanization planet revealing the last bits of major plot & sees Tetsuro needing to make a final decision about what he wants his (& Maetel's) future life to be like. The major theme of the film is the value of a human lifespan & how its limited nature makes it precious & valuable, which is reinforced with the story of Tochiro Oyama, who threw away his past alongside the likes of Harlock & Emeraldas so that he could also hunt down Count Mecha himself. In true fashion of the storytelling of the time the GE999 film is a bit light on focused character development outside of Tetsuro & Maetel, resulting in the appearances of Harlock, Emeraldas, & Tochiro relying mostly on their sheer presences & actions, but said presences & actions leave strong impressions, nonetheless, even if their appearances in the plot here can sometimes feel more like glorified cameos.
So how exactly does this movie's plot & characters transfer over to an English dub produced by Roger Corman? After all, 38 minutes of the film (or roughly 30%) was cut out & I'd argue that most scenes in the film had some sort of relevance to the overall product, so naturally something had to get lost in the process... right? Well, in a bit of a surprise, the answer to this is "No, not really", at least for the most part. Part of this is due to the fact that New World Pictures actually decided to use the original Japanese music (by Nozomu Aoki) & effects track, so they couldn't simply cut anywhere they wanted, as they'd risk putting the M&E track out of sync with the footage. Therefore, most of the cuts seen more or less take advantage of moments where there's no music at all, resulting in a lot of smaller nips & tucks that do add up & can admittedly result in this dub sometimes feeling like it rarely takes a moment to breathe, instead of occasionally letting things slow down more often. However, there are still some entire scenes that have been cut out completely, like the finish of the events on Titan involving Tochiro's mother, Ryuzu performing her song at the Trader's Fork bar being removed (outside of one or two bars during the bar's introduction), or any of the initial set up for Captain Harlock, resulting in "Captain Warlock's" first appearance in the dub being rather sudden & blunt. Most notably, though, this dub removes the entire final encounter with Queen Promethium on the 999 itself, resulting in a member of the supporting cast technically surviving when they should have sacrificed themself!
However, even with these cuts, the movie is still what I'd call an overall accurate representation of the original film, and that simply comes down to the fact that, outside of a handful of name changes, the dub script by Paul Grogan is extremely loyal to the original Japanese. Aside from the name changes I've mentioned earlier, the only other ones to bring up are Tochiro being named "Sundown McMoon", the town of Trader's Fork is now "Hangman's Hollow", resistance leader Antares is now "Olaf", & I'll admit that I was a little surprised to see stuff things like Count Mecha, the Time Castle, Megalopolis, & even Maetel were kept fully intact; Ryuzu is also now "Luz", but that's more of a localization choice than an outright change. I guess after growing up with the likes of 4Kids, Saban, Nelvana, & others (including Warriors of the Wind, which came out only a few years after this dub) I just instantly assumed that "edited dub" automatically meant more altered names. I watched the original Japanese version before watching this dub, and some of the lines in Grogan's script are effectively word-for-word with the modern English subtitles, so there was definitely a concerted effort to maintain accuracy here, which would match with Roger Corman's intention of letting foreign films stand on their own original merits. In fact, the opening credits list Fumi Ishimori alongside Paul Grogan for the script, which is a nice touch & shows how true Corman & Grogan wanted to be to the original. The only truly major change would be the insert song heard when the 999 (now referred to as the "Galaxy Nine-Ninety-Nine") departs Earth, but even that song ("Love Seems Light Years Away" by Renee Feldman & Jay White) is actually just an English arrangement of the original Japanese song ("Yasashiku Shinaide" by Kumiko Kaori), due to the reliance on the M&E track. Even Leiji Matsumoto's name is written in the traditionally accepted romanization (there was a point in the 90s where "Reiji Matsumoto" was a common sight), though Rintaro's name is listed as "Taro Rin", but that was due to how the man's name was originally written in Japanese ("Rin Taro") & localizers simply swapped it for English naming order; even Viz's VHS release of the movie in the 90s used "Taro Rin".
As for the dub itself it's honestly a pretty good one, especially for its time, though there is still a fair bit of cheesiness that's kind of just inherent to an anime dub from that period of time, as standards were just different when it came to voice acting. B.J. Ward (Haggar in Voltron, Ohatsu in Onimusha: Dawn of Dreams) leads things as Joey, whose bizarre "Hanakanabobakananda" middle name was nothing more than lip flap filler due to Grogan seemingly not reworking two separate lines to better match the animation. Anyway, Ward does a pretty good job at delivering a young boy voice, enough so that if Corman had actually cast a teenager going through puberty I could have bought it; Ward also voices Emeralda, and she does fine there, but the character has so few lines, in general. Then there's the late Fay McKay as Maetel, who was traditionally known for singing comedic songs & primarily worked in Las Vegas as an entertainer during her career. With that knowledge it makes sense that her performance as Maetel, the first person to ever voice the iconic character in English, isn't perfect (& arguably sounds a little too old, in my opinion) but you can definitely tell that McKay was at least trying her best; she's the "worst" of the main cast, but not terrible. However, the one performance anyone truly remembers from this dub is that of the late Tony Pope (Dr. Zero in Captain Herlock: The Endless Odyssey, Shunsaku Ban in Metropolis), who voices Captain Warlock as though Leiji Matsumoto's most recognizable character was portrayed by John Wayne... and it's honestly kind of "amazing", which can be taken any way you want; Pope also voiced Olaf, giving him a sort-of Russian accent to match the new name. The only other known role would be Corey Burton (Spike Witwicky in Transformers, Tansu in Delicious in Dungeon) as the Conductor of the 999, and while I get what he was going for here I personally wasn't a fan of Burton's more goofy voice for the Conductor. He's not a major character, sure, but part of the humor in the Japanese version was in how dry he was in his obsession with following the rules of the 999, so making him sound more overtly goofy in the Corman dub kind of messes with that humor. Finally, though their roles apparently have never been confirmed, the Corman dub also credits Booker Bradshaw, Dicey Adams, Gary Seegar, & Jill Fisher.
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| Embassy's VHS cover is really bad, so here's the theatrical poster. |
While Roger Corman was known primarily for his "B-movie" output, that was (by his own admission) simply because he saw what moviegoers were interested in, so he focused on giving people what they wanted/expected. However, Corman definitely had an eye for talent, which is why his legacy will certainly be as the man who gave future film legends & icons their starts, in one way or another, and that also applies to the foreign films he decided to bring over. The first Galaxy Express 999 film is now considered a classic, and Corman was the first person to give it a chance in English. Not just that, but at a time when almost every anime production being brought over was still seeing some sort of modification or alteration to make it more "palatable" for American viewers the Roger Corman Galaxy Express dub was remarkably true to the original Japanese version, as while there were various nips & tucks made throughout the film (which, in turn, does kind of mess with the pacing a little bit) the overall spirit & soul of the original film is still there, and the amount of major name changes made is extremely small for the time. While some continue to associate Corman with Warriors of the Wind as a way to explain the bizarre choices made for that localization, despite New World Pictures only being the distributor for that film, the truth of the matter is that the only anime dub actually associated with Roger Corman holds up remarkably better than you'd expect after 43 years.
Sure, it's not an ideal way to watch it today, since there's Viz's uncut dub from the 90s, but it is annoying to see that licensing hell has prevented the OG Galaxy Express 999 movie dub from seeing re-release alongside its later dub, because aside from basic preservation it also shows that had Corman continued working with anime he could have possibly been a true trailblazer in that field here in North America, just like he was with the various people he gave opportunities to over the decades.
Rest in Peace, Roger Corman
Galaxy Express 999: The Movie © 1979 Toei Animation © Leiji Matsumoto, Toei Animation
Galaxy Express © 1979 Toei Co., Ltd.
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